Facebook Goes Down, Users Call 911 and Storm Twitter

Facebook was briefly down for several users in the U.S. and other countries on Friday afternoon, creating havoc with some people even calling 911.

The world's largest social networking site with more than 1.3 billion users worldwide, Facebook, crashed for a brief time on Friday afternoon. As expected, people flooded Twitter under hashtag #FacebookDown. But the latest outage also led to some extreme reactions from some users in the US, who called 911 to report the so-called emergency.

The 911-calling incident was reported by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Sgt. Burton Brink, who took to Twitter to explain that the law enforcement has no role to play in bringing Facebook back. The LAPD Communications Twitter account also communicated a similar message when it began conducting a Q&A for 911-related queries.

#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!

According to Mashable, the outage lasted about 30 minutes but users experienced latency while using the service until it returned to normal at about 2 p.m. ET. Outage checking websites, Down for Everyone or Just Me and Is It Down Right Now confirmed the Facebook's outage, but the current status shows the service is working fine.

"Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time," a Facebook representative said in a statement confirming the outage to Mashable. "We quickly investigated and are currently restoring service for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

Facebook's outage on Friday affected the developer webpage, where the social network updates the status of the errors on its site. According to the API response time graph on the Facebook Platform Status webpage, a prominent spike was seen just before 12 p.m. ET. The service was stable for about 5 hours and Facebook said the team was working on a final fix and guaranteed no further regression.

According to Topsy data, Twitter usage increased during the Facebook downtime. Matt Navarra posted a graph showing a sudden spike in the mentions of #FacebookDown, which crossed 15,800 in under 20 minutes.

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Facebook, Goes, Down, Users, Call, 911, Storms, Twitter